Accepting What Is to Create What Can Be
Featured Narrative: Selma Ungar, 91-Year-Old Widow
I do change with the times; I don’t stay stuck with old habits.
“I get down like everybody else does. Believe me,” Selma Ungar is assuring me. We’ve been talking about her exuberance for life at a stage when many might choose to relinquish aspiration. I want to understand how she thrives in the midst of tumult and loss, rather than retreating and permitting those circumstances to define the outer parameters of her life. Because, the fact is, the configuration of Selma’s life has changed dramatically from what it once was. In some ways, that life was not atypical or unusual, despite its richness. She had a long marriage, raised a family, helped her husband in his business when needed, and eagerly volunteered for causes she cared about. There were challenges, of course, twists and turns, the marital bumps when she considered leaving, the financial pressures of owning a business when she and her husband “were both ready to throw everything away.” But when I interviewed her, most of those defining anchors in her life were gone. She was widowed and her children were long grown. Volunteering was more difficult and less of a fixture. In their place, Selma had created something else, something altogether different. And while this might be a feat for anyone, the reconstruction of a life, I’m particularly interested in how she’s doing it at this time and place. Because, at 91, Selma is going to the gym every day, driving a red convertible, and doing online dating.
“Things change and I change with them,” Selma’s telling me. I’m trying to understand how she remains so incredibly nimble, asking how she embraces life so fully. I could mistake her answer as wholly incomplete rather than the profound statement that it is, but she actually lives these words. Technology? “I couldn’t live without a computer, I can tell you that,” she says. Whether corresponding with suitors, watching streaming, playing bridge, or checking in on friends, many scattered throughout the United States and some ailing, to daily share the details of life, her computer is both disruptor of loneliness and conduit to connection. “We know every little thing that’s happening,” she says of those friendships maintained over the ether. She doesn’t believe there’s anything intentional that she’s doing to cultivate this zest for living and says that she’s “always just enjoyed anything that’s happening in life.” I could well imagine that her vitality and adaptability might simply be a part of who she is. And has always been.
But, her elasticity is no accident, her finesse a choice. As Selma shares her story, and I try to deconstruct the grace with which she maneuvers through change, I discover a wealth of skill and deliberate resilience. Whether it’s that she never really paid much attention to aging until her 90th birthday—that one, she said, “sounded awfully old, and I don’t feel that way”—or that she combines the optimism of making new friends with the poignant understanding that they may not be long relationships—“Some of the support system’s leaving because everybody’s dying”—Selma has a chosen a way of looking at things that enables her to focus on what’s helpful, let go of what’s not, and take action where it most matters.
But that wasn’t always the case. Aging, she tells me, has imparted a gift. Despite what it takes away, growing older has given Selma a tranquility that eluded her in years past. Stories from her younger days provide a window. There was the teapot purchased on her first wedding anniversary that read, “Don’t worry, it may never happen,” a gift from her husband. The challenges she doesn’t think she “could have weathered” without his reassuring presence. The annoyances with people whom she would decide to “have nothing to do with.” But that has changed. She has changed. Time and experience have granted her a different perspective: “I found one thing as you get older, I think you accept more.”
As we explore this notion of acceptance, I wonder if it is, paradoxically, the fuel for Selma’s adaptability. I wonder if it’s her secret weapon. Because she’s not just talking about being better at letting go of the irritations of people and their quirks, although those, too, rarely bother her any more. She’s referring to accepting change itself, and the circumstances it dictates, almost always without her consent. She has found a way to relax into what is. In a different person, acceptance might be in danger of becoming resignation. But in Selma, it is propulsion toward what is still yet. With her gaze steadily fixed on what’s possible rather than lamenting what has been, she says, “I’m always getting involved in something.” There are her creative endeavors like painting, which fill the walls of her house; social outings where she’s known for never returning “home from anywhere without having a friend or knowing their life history”; and her “real love” of cooking, which sends her into the kitchen whenever she’s upset. All of this is in addition to her regimen at the gym, dating, and keeping up with friends and family.
If there is any sadness for what once was, it is volunteering with regularity and consistency. She reminisces about the organizations she presided over as president, fondly remembering a fundraising campaign that provided wheelchairs to those in need. Confessing that she was always more an ideas than details person, she never shied away from “being the one to go ask people for money.” During the somewhat difficult transition of increasingly working more in her husband’s business, when the kids were young, she found herself unable to participate in many of the activities she’d always enjoyed and “kind of broke away from everybody.” It was volunteering that gave her something that she loved again, as she threw herself into fundraising in the schools and “became friendly with people all over the country.”
But gone is the time when she can dive into a cause, full-on. She’s had to scale back, adjust.
That is such a lonely spot. I mean, I’d give anything to be, you know, helping. But at this stage you just can’t count on what days you can go and stay so many hours. . . . But that I miss. Oh, I miss being able to do for other people.
Even here, Selma has rearranged what was into what can be. As we talk, she’s making flower pens and recently took “a whole bunch to the doctor’s office . . . just giving them out to everybody.” Last year was the fundraiser for breast cancer when she crafted necklaces fashioned from men’s ties. And, for several years, knowing that she didn’t want to be president of the friendship club in her community, she was instead simply calling “everybody that was new and trying to make them feel welcome.” Although the circumstances of her health are less reliable than they once were, she says that if there’s “a problem somewhere, I’m the first one even now, you know, that will go . . . and do something.”
It would be an omission not to acknowledge volunteering for the significant ingredient it is in Selma’s enduring enthusiasm. Despite most of life’s external markers having shape-shifted, leaving her with less rather than more, volunteering remains. Yes, it has changed, been curtailed, but her desire to help others and contribute seems to simultaneously moor and invigorate her. “I get more out of it than I’m actually giving,” Selma reports. “I mean, I know I’m giving a lot, but there’s such satisfaction.” She may adore cooking, but contributing to the lives of others might be the thing that feeds her.
How does she keep her sights trained on what can still be, I want to know? How does she maintain such a hopeful focus? She tells me,
Years ago, I wondered why my mother never got excited if I told her an old friend died, or something. Usually you hear “Oh my God, so-and-so died,” and you’re all upset. She just kind of took it and rolled with the punches. And, I think maybe I’m doing that. I feel so sad about it, but then I think of all the ones that are living . . . and you’ve got to be grateful for it.
As she shares this, I think about all the times I’ve read about the benefits of gratitude and how it seems to be a way of thinking for Selma and a part of her adaptation formula. I consider that although adaptable might be an accurate descriptor of Selma, it seems meager and incomplete for what she’s accomplished at this stage in life, a time when so much more is taken than replenished. She claims not to be able to give anyone a recipe for what she creates in her kitchen, cooking as she does “just by feel, not by rules,” but I wonder if she does, in fact, possess one master recipe from which she creates all else. And I wonder if it looks something like this: Acceptance + Focus on Possibility + Action = Living Courage.
There is one aspect of life that has remained untouched by time, Selma explains. We’ve been talking about dating at 91, particularly online dating, and it’s a bit like two girlfriends swapping stories, despite the almost half century that separates us. “Nothing changes,” she reports. Biting the inside of my cheek, I stifle a giggle as I hear the spunk in her voice. Was it intimidating, I want to know? Particularly after being married for so long? I’m in awe of her ease with all this. She waited three years before plunging in. Cautious at first, she tried researching prospective beaus online, but could find little more than if they’d done jail time, so she gave that up. She sensed something was “suspicious” with her very first online admirer despite his e-mails that had “all the sweet things we all want to hear.” A mutual friend confirmed her instinct: The man had a wife in the next room as he typed. Other than that first bad apple, the men she’s met have been nothing but “lovely, lovely people.” And while health concerns sometimes intrude, cutting short a budding romance, she still hears from them all. Her biggest discovery about dating at this time in life? “It’s not much different than when we were teenagers,” she relays. Dexterous though she may be with online dating and romance at 91, there is one area of life, perhaps the sole jurisdiction, where Selma insists that she won’t budge: “I’ve never paid for a cup of coffee with a man, and I’m not about to. But I’m old-fashioned.”